What does cooking have to do with the environment?

Can cooking be non-organic?

Every year, inhaling poisonous smoke is the cause of the death of more than a million children and women. According to research compiled by the MAE, death from poisoning Chad is the second leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the director of the International Energy Agency, Faith Birol

‍If we are talking about energy and climate issues in Africa today, the most important issue is the ecological preparation of meals (clean cooking).‍

MAEChCE President, for the European Union to support the promotion of the idea clean cooking during COP28.

What is clean cooking? MAE Report A Vision for Clean Cooking Access for All (A vision of climate-neutral cooking accessible to all) defines them as household access to the use of essential cooking products, fuels and equipment that significantly limit or do not emit pollutants harmful to human health. More than two billion people are currently deprived of the opportunity to prepare their meals organically. This problem particularly affects countries on the African continent, where energy infrastructure is least developed. In 2015, the UN set a goal for member states: to ensure that their citizens have access to the use of organic cooking by 2030. To this day, in some sub-Saharan countries, clean cooking fuels account for only 1-1.5% of the total consumption of energy carriers for heating purposes.

How do Asian countries provide access to clean cooking?

The situation is different in Asian countries, where year by year the number of people without access to ecological ways of preparing meals decreases. According to the aforementioned report by the IEA in Asia, since 2010, this share has decreased by 0.7 billion people, and every year there is an increase of 2-4% in the number of people who access modern kitchens. This is due to the active policies of the largest developing countries, which are trying to solve the problem of energy poverty.

Thanks to the initiatives of the Indian Ministry of Oil and Natural Gas, more than 80 million of the poorest households have received subsidies to buy LPG stoves. Since 2015, the number of LPG users in India alone has increased by 300 million. In Indonesia, the government also subsidizes aid programs based on increasing access to LPG, which has contributed to an increase in the number of people using organic cooking by 60 million, or about 25 percent of the country's population.

More than 70% of the population of the PRC already has access to household appliances that allow cooking in an ecological way. This group also includes a growing number of electricity-powered devices, which is probably the result of mass migration of the population from the countryside to the cities (130 million Chinese have migrated to urban areas since 2015), where access to distribution infrastructure is greater and more reliable. In rural areas, LPG and natural gas remain the most common energy carriers.

To meet the challenge of an avalanche of energy demand growth, China has been investing consistently in the diversification of sources for many years. The Middle Kingdom is constantly modernizing and looking for new solutions, including environmentally sustainable ones, taking into account the air quality in Chinese metropolises - among the widespread energy carriers, besides nuclear energy or photovoltaic, there is also gas, including LPG.

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Meeting the hard reality

In Africa, the biggest barrier to the energy transition is the lack of infrastructure, and in particular the widespread lack of access to electricity. 43% of the continent's population does not have access to electricity, because African societies are mostly still rural societies — large-scale urbanization is just beginning. The data leaves no doubt — four and five people in the sub-Saharan region cannot cook with low-carbon fuels. The situation was aggravated by the energy crisis of 2022, which forced 100 million households to return to traditional cooking methods due to rising raw material prices. The situation may worsen as the population of sub-Saharan African countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria increases. The modernization of infrastructure in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals is not keeping pace with demographic changes, which is why experts predict, that by 2030, almost a billion people on the African continent will still not have access to green food preparation technology.

Africa as if in a lens shows all the challenges of organic cooking. Lack of infrastructure hampers the spread of modern household appliances. Electrification under power-deficit conditions in energy systems is currently unrealistic even for urban centres — in this case the demand for energy would increase disproportionately to the capacity of the infrastructure currently in operation.

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The LPG solution?

In regions with underdeveloped infrastructure or affected by natural disasters or humanitarian crises, the solution to the lack of access to green food preparation technologies is liquefied gas. According to the Access for All scenario, which the UN plans to achieve by 2030, LPG ranks first among fuels designed to provide Africa's population with access to clean cooking. According to the IEA forecasts, by 2030, the demand for LPG on the continent will more than triple, and LPG will become the most important tool to solve the lack of access to ecological cooking. This is with the full acceptance of the World Health Organization, which sees liquefied gas as an instrument to improve the quality of life and health standards of African societies. Liquefied gas is a cost-effective solution that improves health and environmental standards, while being easy to transport and store. It is not for nothing that the International Energy Agency points to Africa as the most promising market for LPG in the coming decades. The report shows that since 2010, more than 70% of people who have obtained the opportunity to use organic food preparation have used liquefied gas for this purpose, and the IEA expects that, thanks to LPG, more than half of Africans will benefit from cooking in healthy conditions by 2030.

Already today in Africa we are faced with unprecedented innovations that allow easy access to liquefied gas in specific local conditions — for example, in East Africa, self-service dispensers have appeared, where users can independently replenish the gas in the cylinder using authorization and mobile micropayments.

summary

Analyses of the International Energy Agency carried out for the purposes of the report A Vision for Clean Cooking Access for All They indicate that switching from traditional solid fuels (wood, coal, animal excrement) to LPG means a significant reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic substances.

The massive spread of LPG in Africa will contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and dramatically reduce the incidence of diseases, mainly women and children, from pollution-related diseases generated by the operation of traditional solid fuel stoves (3.7 million people die prematurely annually in sub-Saharan Africa). It is these groups that are most exposed to toxic substances that are released in the process of burning charcoal, animal excrement and garbage.

LPG is an essential part of solving the problem of meal preparation for the growing population of developing countries. Funding from climate change adaptation funds to improve rural communities' access to green food preparation technologies — such as liquefied gas — will help liberate the population of these countries from energy poverty and improve health outcomes, as well as provide a significant boost to economic development.

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About LPG at COP28

The World LPG Association will host a session at the COP28 climate summit, during the accompanying conference of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) event “Climate Action is Everyone's Business Forum”.

Date: December 6, 2023 (Wednesday), 16:00-17:00

We invite you to participate in the session remotely using the link: https://bit.ly/WLPGA_COP28 (Password: PARTNER)